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Folly for Christ's Sake in Early Irish Literature

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Folly for Christ's Sake in Early Irish Literature Folly for Christ’s Sake in Early Irish Literature: the Case of Suibhne Geilt Reconsidered1 Alexandra Bergholm 1. Introduction ‘Madness and Christianity go hand in hand’ (Screech 1985, 25). This claim can be considered quite accurate, at least when one examines the variety of spiritual behaviour demonstrated during the history of the Christian faith. One interesting example of holy madness in Christianity is folly for Christ’s sake, a particular ascetic practice that is most developed in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the Byzantine tradition the holy person feigning insanity was called salos, meaning ‘mentally deranged’. In Russian the term used is iurodivy, derived from the word meaning ‘ugly, crippled, an individual with congenital defects’ (Kobets 2006). Martin Buber describes the fool for God as ‘a human being who, because of his undamaged direct relationship with God, has quitted the rules and regulations of the social order, though he continues to participate in the life of his fellow men’ (cited in Saward 1980, 1-2). In both Byzantine and later Russian tradition, where holy fools are recognised as a hagiographic category in their own right, the figure’s eccentric conduct is marked most notably by the feigning of madness, but also by other characteristics such as wandering about naked, uttering riddles and prophecies, and making oneself a spectacle by publicly displaying disruptive behaviour and violating accepted norms. The controversial appearance, speech and actions are all part of a conscious exploit, which aims at providing spiritual guidance to the people while concealing the true sanctity of the holy fool (Kobets 2006; Ivanov 2006). Thus by abandoning the secluded lifestyle of a monastery, the fools in Christ choose to make their asceticism part of the secular sphere in order to promote the laymen’s understanding of God. This ‘altruistic folly’, as it has sometimes been called (Syrkin 1982, 166, 50n.), is what sets the holy fool apart from real madmen as well as from other forms of unruly or provocative behaviour. In the history of the phenomenon of saintly madness, the theme of subversive sanctity has often been seen to originate in the actions of the Jewish prophets and 1 The writing of this article has been funded by the Academy of Finland project number 1211006. Alexandra Bergholm, [email protected] Department of Comparative Religion, University of Helsinki Studia Celtica Fennica IV (2007) 7-14, ISSN 1795–097X, © Finnish Society for Celtic Studies Alexandra Bergholm the Syrian and Egyptian desert-dwellers of the early centuries A.D. (Kobets 2006; Saward 1980, 1). In the Christian tradition, the most direct biblical examples are found in the writings of apostle Paul and the Gospels, where the Passion of Christ sets the paradigm for the imitation of Christ’s suffering of humiliation, mockery and physical pain.2 Although a more detailed treatment of the topic is beyond the scope of the present paper, it is necessary to mention in passing that the concept of foolish wisdom or the figure of a saintly fool is by no means restricted to Christian religious life, but forms a part of other traditions as well (see for example Feuerstein 1992). The Encyclopaedia of Religion (Eliade 1987) does not include an entry for the holy fools as such, but refers the reader to articles under the headings of clowns and humor and satire. This treatment of the topic in the Encyclopaedia is based on the similar nature of clowns and fools as trickster-like figures, whose ambiguity and paradoxical character encompasses a notion of liminality and mediation between established cultural categories, such as madness and wisdom, normal and abnormal, or sacred and profane.3 While holy foolishness never became established in Western spirituality in the form it took in the East, it still constituted part of Western Christianity. However, ‘these two religious traditions perceived, endorsed and validated this phenomenon in very different ways’ (Kobets 2000a). The aim of the present article is to examine the idea of folly for Christ’s sake in the context of early Irish literature by looking at one particular text, which in the past has attracted interest as the primary example of foolishness in Christ as an identifiable feature of early Irish Christianity. The 12th century Middle Irish tale Buile Shuibhne or ‘The Frenzy of Suibhne’4 has prompted several scholars to argue that the wild madness, or geltacht, of its main protagonist Suibhne Geilt can be treated as historical evidence for the practice of a specific form of asceticism in 7th century Ireland. Thus John Saward, for instance, in his study Perfect Fools takes the figure of Suibhne as an example of ‘a fool with a tendency towards asceticism’ whose ‘fervent resistance to conformity to the wisdom of the world’ may be compared with that of the Eastern holy fools (1980, 34-42). Kobets in turn refers to the Irish wild men or gelta collectively as a historical monastic order that had a reputation as ‘wild, mad monks’ (2000a), 2 The articles by Špidlík and Vandenbroucke in Dictionnaire de spiritualité 5 (1964), s.v. Fous pour le Christ include a list of biblical references and a discussion of the characteristics of folly for Christ. For comprehensive treatments of the phenomenon in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality see also Saward 1980 and Kobets 2000a. 3 For trickster figures in the Irish context in particular see the study by Alan Harrison (1989). 4 I have been using O’Keeffe’s edition and English translation of Buile Shuibhne, first published in 1913 and reprinted in 1996. In the following the numbers in brackets refer to the passages in O’Keeffe’s edition. 5 In her endnotes Kobets refers to Kathleen Hughes’ work The Church in Early Irish Society (1966) as her source (32n.). 8 Folly for Christ’s Sake in Early Irish Literature: and Sergey Ivanov, although dismissing the link to folly for Christ, still presents geltacht as ‘a special type of ancient Irish sainthood’ (2006, 382).6 In this paper I wish to reassess these assumptions by considering certain dominant elements of Suibhne’s story, and comparing some of the characteristics of the geilt and what could perhaps be seen as the typological figure of the holy fool. Instead of attempting a detailed analysis of the material concerning the saintly fools in Eastern Orthodoxy, I will be concentrating on the aspects that have initially led scholars to detect similarities between Buile Shuibhne and the paradigm of folly for Christ’s sake, in order to re-evaluate whether the identification of Suibhne as a holy fool in this sense is indeed a valid one.7 2. Suibhne – the madman In the text Buile Shuibhne, king Suibhne is cursed by Saint Rónán after his repeated unprovoked attacks against the saint. Following Rónán’s curse, in which he beseeches God that the arrogant king would ‘ever be naked, wandering and flying throughout the world’ (§ 5), Suibhne loses his wits during the historical battle of Mag Rath in 637 and flees from the battlefield. He becomes a wild, animal-like madman, who wanders restlessly in the woods, lives in trees and shies away from people. As a result of his madness, Suibhne gains supernatural capacities, such as the ability to travel great distances by levitating or leaping, and composes eloquent poetry praising the surrounding nature as well as describing his hardships. In his poems the madman repeatedly addresses God and Christ directly in a way that conveys devotion and repentance, but also anguish, bitterness and even anger. Eventually, another saint called Moling befriends Suibhne and writes down his story. The madman’s life finally comes to an end when he is killed by saint Moling’s swineherd, who wrongly accuses him of adultery with his wife. Before dying, Suibhne receives communion from Moling. He is buried in holy ground and his blessed soul goes to heaven. While this short summary of the plot does not do justice to the subtleties of the text, it nevertheless helps to illustrate some of the apparent similarities between the figure of the geilt and that of the holy fool. It should be noted that on two different occasions at the end of the story Suibhne, whose death is greatly mourned 6 Referring to a study by Tatyana Mikhailova, Ivanov states that ‘the so called geiltah [sic] has nothing in common with holy foolery, since it was merely an extreme form of penitence’ (footnote 32). 7 I have to acknowledge that unfortunately I have been unable to familiarise myself with the conclusions reached by Professor Mikhailova in her comparative study of the Russian and Irish materials, as this article has only been published in Russian. For full details of Mikhailova’s article see Ivanov 2006. 9 Alexandra Bergholm by Moling and his clerics, is eulogised by them as náoimhgheilt, or ‘the saintly madman’ (§ 80, 85). This seems to indicate that the contemporary audience of the tale attached some notion of sanctity to Suibhne’s madness and wild existence. To discuss how this saintliness bears resemblance to folly for Christ’s sake, I will first consider some individual elements before proceeding to the possible ideological content of the tale. 3. Characteristics of holy folly John Saward has identified several central aspects that constitute the tradition of holy folly in Eastern and Western Christianity alike. In addition to the characteristics already outlined in the very beginning of the present article, Saward notes that the holy fool’s feigned madness is marked by an eschatological quest, which makes him a perpetual wanderer and an outsider. The deliberately restless and even aggressive behaviour of the fool aims to draw attention to the hypocrisy of false piety, but at the same time it represents an unstable element in society that also endows him with special power and status (Saward 1980).
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